Novel · A way to begin
Not Out of Hate
မုန်း၍မဟူ
Journal Kyaw Ma Ma Lay · 1955
Synopsis
In the thirties, at Moulmeingyun, in the Irrawaddy delta, Way Way keeps the accounts of her father, a sick rice merchant, since her mother withdrew to a convent. The new agent of a British firm, U Saw Han, a Burmese man twenty years her senior but entirely devoted to English ways, moves into the house next door; his manners astonish the family. Way Way falls in love with him and marries him. The husband, without cruelty but sure of his right, then regulates her clothes, her food and her care in the Western manner, and takes her away from her father.
Context
The novel, dated 1955, reads as an allegory: Way Way stands for the country and U Saw Han for colonial England, and the narrative covers the years leading from the colony to the Japanese occupation. Margaret Aung-Thwin translated it into English in 1991, with an introduction by Anna Allott; the French translation by Jean-Claude Augé and Khin Lay Myint, the author's daughter, was published in 1994 in the collection Lettres asiatiques. The book has also been translated into Russian, Uzbek and Chinese.
Who it is for
A novel of about two hundred and forty pages, slow and domestic, readable in French and in English.
Prizes and reception
National prize for literature in Burma in 1955; one of the few Burmese novels translated into several languages.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.